User:JamesStevenson

From the ALSA wiki

Alright, let's see here... My name is James and I am a musician. I am interested in computers and technology in general, I guess, but Linux in particular because of its philosophy and it's political stance (or, at least, its supposed political stance). I take every word I just said back.

I use a cheap-ass Dell PC that was bought some years ago, which is equipped with one 40 GB hard drive (for operating system stuff, mostly), and one 60 GB hard drive (for music). This machine has only an integrated sound card, which I find most useful. It's handled via ALSA's intel8x0 driver, and I also use ALSA's usb-audio driver for my Evolution USB MIDI keyboard. The CPU for this machine is a 2.4GHz Pentium 4. I really believe in the power of Linux in taking advantage of any given scenerio, when configured justly.

So there isn't much in my life of Linux audio other than a cheap-ass PC and a bunch of free software, but I'm so interested in so many different instruments and ideas, that I must come back here some day to elaborate on my journies.

• A custom 2.6 Linux kernel

• The Debian distribution with only packages for the base system (including X)

  [update]: I find it difficult to use only the base system packages (graphical toolkits, X, you know, the general OS) and then to compile everything from source. It seems easy at first, and everything will go pretty well if the build environment *seems* sane, but there's always little inconviences along the way, so I'm trying now to harness the packages and maybe I can make packages from source when appropriate. I used to use Debian Sid, but now I'm using Sarge because I didn't like wondering what was happening - I'm not familiar enough I guess.

• ALSA and JACK

  I've gotten so used to JACK that it seems like a real shame when an application (especially one as good as Sweep, for example) doesn't doesn't support it, I just want to open the source code and make it perfect - but alas, I am no programmer. Some day.

• Patchage (for patching JACK applications to each other/sound card's IO)

  This is way better than QJackCtl if you ask me because of the modular patching. The tree patching method used in QJackCtl isn't as intuitive for me as it is here. Of course, Patchage could use some interface polishing, but don't tell the author I said that.

• Om

  Simply the best.

• Jack-Rack and/or FreqTweak

  For mangling audio streams

• Specimen

  No frills sampling facility. As a side-note: anyone here tried JTrigger?

• SEQ24 (for triggering percussion, melody, harmony, sound effects, etc., which are embedded in other applications)
• ZynAddSubFX (for quick and dependable sound scape sculpture)
• ReZound, Sweep, and Snd (for audio editing as all three have unique advantages and disadvantages)
• Ardour (the God of my setup)

I look forward to adding more information on my setup and how it all works, and my progress with music, linux audio technology and life in general. I should have somewhere to put my stuff some day. I look around, but uh, I'm a horribly lazy person when it comes to some things (not music, tho).

James

Welcome to you James. Looking forward to hearing more about yourself, your system and how you use it. I am amazed you can get by using only an integrated sound card, well done!